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teamhasnoi writes "In a followup to yesterday's story the developer of Display Eater has responded to the poor publicity, admitting that the app does not delete files. Quote: "It was my hope that if people thought this happened, they would not try to pirate the program. I could stop wasting time writing copy protection routines to be broken over and over.
It turned out to be a mistake."
He has now made the application free by posting a registration code, and plans to open-source it."

teamhasnoi writes "Back in 2004, Slashdot discussed a program that deleted your home directory on entry of a pirated serial number. Now, a new developer is using the same method to protect his software, aptly named Display Eater. In the dev's own words, "There exist several illegal cd-keys that you can use to unlock the demo program. If Display Eater detects that you are using these, it will erase something. I don't know if this is going to become Display Eater policy. If this level of piracy continues, development will stop." Is deleting user data ever acceptable, even when defending one's software from piracy?"

(SF)exlex writes "The popular forums for the Australian magazine AtomicMPC, a Haymarket Media publication, have banned linking to any other forums on the internet as described in their updated FAQ:
""Linking to any competitor site for the explicit purpose of recruiting new members is not allowed. It's simply bad form. We respect what you give, please respect what we provide.
Linking to a competitor site that contains information related to the conversational topic at hand is fine.
Acceptable examples: Posting to another tech site that has information not found on Atomic, or a game site that has exclusive information.
Sending a PM to any member with the aim of recruiting for another site similar in forum content to Atomic is not allowed, and really is just plain bad manners. If you receive such a PM please report it to the moderators.
These rules also apply to links in your sig.""
In enforcing these rules members have been forced to remove any links to their personal websites in their sigs if they have a forum."

bblboy54 writes "Gizmodo has declared March the month to boycott the RIAA. Sound The Sirens and p2p.net have both already shown their support for this. From the article:Gizmodo is declaring the month of March Boycott the RIAA month. We want to get the word out to as many people as humanly possible that we can all send a message by refusing to buy any album put out by an RIAA label. Am I saying you should start pirating music? Not at all. You can continue to support the artists you enjoy and respect in a number of ways."

An anonymous reader writes "New on the Bad Guys blog:
FBI Translating Over 1,000 Wiretap Conversations a Day
Spurred by adding hundreds of new linguists and help from allies overseas, the FBI is translating a record 34,000 wiretapped conversations a month, Bureau officials tell the Bad Guys blog. http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/badguys/070220/f bi_translating_over_1000_wire.htm
Long criticized for their lack of language specialists, FBI officials say they are finally catching up to an unprecedented intake of surveillance since 9/11. In the last four years, the Bureau's counterterrorism investigations have netted a windfall of foreign language materials:
Over 500,000 hours of audio
5.5 million electronic data files
1.8 million pages of text
The growth in FBI electronic surveillance is due largely to counterterrorism and counterintelligence wiretaps. The number of national security wiretaps approved by the secret FISA court jumped by 122 percent from 2001 to 2005, the story notes, while criminal wiretaps have increased by only 19 percent."

Alex Dunlop (1066630) writes "Eagle-eyed conspiracy buffs have pounced on a recent rash of compromised eBay user accounts as proof of a mile-wide hole in the auctioneer's front lines, giving new life to a theory that could one day rival the intrigue surrounding Roswell UFO crashing and Kennedy assassinations.
Details remained sketchy, and of course, eBay managers have assembled the requisite wall of plausible deniability, but here's what we've pieced together so far: Over the past few days, several dozen eBay auctions — many selling pricey items such as Cartier Tank watches — have been hijacked by crooks who append legitimate auctions with notes suggesting would-be buyers contact a Gmail account for a special, "buy-it-now" discount. (Our initial Google search, trolling for tell-tale signs of the scam, returned 73 results; those numbers thinned over the next several hours, presumably, as the tired souls in eBay's security group pulled down offending pages.)
An eBay spokesman says all indications suggest that the accounts were compromised through plain-vanilla phishing techniques, in which unwitting users fall prey to spoofed emails and give passwords to their attackers. End of story, right?
Not quite. While the more timid among us would be tempted to agree with the company's party line, a chorus of eBay critics say there is something much more nefarious going on. They argue the episode is the latest proof of the existence of back door that has been built into the company's corporate network, allowing an attacker or a cadre of attackers to siphon login credentials and other confidential information from the site's users.
Who's in the Hoody?
Suspicions of a cover-up date back at least to December, when according to a post on The Auction Guild, a reader named Jack reported that his eBay account had been hijacked by crooks who were using it to sell BAPE Hoody shirts. On at least two occasions — once from a work PC, the other from his fire-walled home network — Jack retook control of his account and changed the passwords and other settings. Each time, the attacker was able to regain access.
"In trying to analyze what was going on, it appeared that the hijacker or hijackers had to have access to accounts independent of passwords, and have the ability to set account parameters so the legit account holder would not know what was going on," the Auction Guild posting theorizes. "If this is so, it either points to someone working inside eBay, or to a security hole so big, you can drive a tractor trailer through it."
A month later, Auction Guild was back, this time with evidence that a Romanian hacker going by the name Vladuz had developed and was circulating a sophisticated tool that reads confidential information residing on eBay's internal network, allowing attackers free reign of virtually any account and a trove of information that could be used in phishing attacks. A screen shot on another blog known to be hostile to eBay also purports to show Vladuz having gained the credentials of an eBay customer service representative on a public forum. "How about you start arguing in English?" the hacker taunts the crowd. "So I can laugh at you."
eBay spokesman Hani Durzy acknowledges that the hacker was able to gain access to a "single-digit number" of email accounts reserved for customer service employees, but he insists those accounts were maintained by servers that are entirely separate from the network where customer databases and confidential corporate information are stored. eBay officials know the identity of Vladuz and have alerted US and Romanian officials of his deeds, Durzy says.
But like any plausible denial, Durzy's is accompanied by a cloak of secrecy that officials say is necessary to maintain security, but that conspiracy theorists insist is designed to keep the lie alive. One such detail being kept under wraps is how Vladuz managed to gain the credentials of an eBay employee in the first place, or how officials can be sure the intruder never gained access to more sensitive parts of eBay's network.
Even more suspicious, according to AuctionBytes, is the recent removal of a link from an eBay forum that exposed account holders' names, addresses, and user names and passwords. Indeed, eBay officials appeared to have purged an entire forum thread where conspiracy theorists were discussing the vast cover up. (A capture of a more recent thread can be found here.
Not quite as compelling a plot as The X-files or Oliver Stone's JFK. But with all the round and round, we get the feeling this one may have more staying power. ®
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/02/20/ebay_c onspiracy/"